


anodyne touch

by meikuree (rillarev), rillarev



Series: maybe it's my hard head that keeps me dreaming [7]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Universe, Character Study, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Introspection, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Serious Injuries, medical emergencies as philosophical epiphanies, titan shifter regeneration as a thinly veiled metaphor for chronic pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29480112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillarev/pseuds/meikuree, https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillarev/pseuds/rillarev
Summary: Love and existential wounds in the time of war, or: Pieck stumbles into Yelena's grasp one day, badly injured and in need of help.
Relationships: Pieck Finger/Yelena
Series: maybe it's my hard head that keeps me dreaming [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652560
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	anodyne touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minos_forlorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minos_forlorn/gifts).



> minos_forlorn: I heard you enjoy hurt/comfort, and it occurred to me while writing this that I had myself been inspired in parts by your previous hurt/comfort fic, so I decided it was only proper to let this be a small homage to the virtuous influence your excellent ideas have had on my take on these two. thank you for being a lovely friend to swap ideas/headcanons with, and I hope you like reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!
> 
> note: this is set before the three-year timeskip. Yelena hasn’t met Zeke properly at this point. 
> 
> see the endnotes for expanded content warnings about descriptions of injuries in this fic.
> 
> EDIT: the amazing minos_forlorn has made some fanart for this story, which can be viewed [here](https://mobile.twitter.com/todustagain/status/1362027074958086144)

When Yelena first tells Pieck about her new base for the sift-bodied creature of a rebellion being cooked up among soldiers, a secret outpost difficult to know of and even more difficult to find, it’s meant to be little more than a touch of conversational bravado. Just an ironic boast, truly, and not meant to be taken seriously at all, because it’s custom for Yelena to put on haughty airs and play on the side of the theatrical, and she had assumed Pieck also knew this.

So when she laughs and says things on that occasion like _ah, did you know I now have an office of my own?_ as though she has suddenly become the commander of something proud and notable, knowingly self-satirical, it’s simply a jest. It is not _her_ office, for one, though she likes to call it that for the sheer panache and entertainment of it, and neither has it grown into anything significant yet. It’s still a jest when she divulges its existence and location to Pieck in a moment of tell-all candour, with an offer to leave the Warriors and play at revolution with her and her group of ragtag collaborators instead. It’s intended to be another secret she donates to Pieck’s mental library of pieces of intel or whatever-you-call-it, a casual token of her trust in her and her ability to take secrets to the grave with her, and she had expected its story to be done and dusted once that conversation was closed and came to an end. 

So when she does find Pieck coming to her outpost one day, in the balmy stasis of spring April, she is not pleased.

But neither is she prepared for what comes after.

Most days, the rebel outpost is quiet. It is a refuge, a humble and squat building shielded by some verdant words to the left. Yelena and the others pulled it back from the fog of obscurity at an unused border between Marley and its unmentionable western neighbour, one or two years ago. In its old life, it was an overnight stay for soldiers out on the field. Now it is a ghost on the map, missing and unexplained and content to stay that way. All better to serve as their conspiracy office, really, as Yelena herself would fondly call it. It is comfortable enough to serve as a retreat, for a private conference over tea, for convening with other like-minded rebels and soldiers. 

The day Pieck barges in uninvited is not one of those days. Marley is in the throes of another conflict, and that means work for everyone to do. She’s not being stationed for once for this particular one, because the top brass have ruled it an objectively minor skirmish, easily dealt with by the Warriors alone, but the flipside of that is that she has to toil and conduct her own surveillance. 

It means she is caught in a frenzy of movement and papers, messes spread out over desks everywhere in one enclosed space, ill at ease to avoid stepping on a rustle of flimsy and files on the ground as she dashes about. It means that she is absorbed in the details of her work, mind scattered and annoyed. That the next moment comes like a slash of violence. 

Three sharp raps on the door are all the warning she gets. Then the door bursts open with desperate force as someone staggers in, shuffling weakly on what sounds like a pair of unsteady feet. Yelena instinctively whips her head around, about to tell whoever just barged in to get out— and is chilled to see that the intruder is none other than Pieck. 

Yelena can’t see her face clearly with the way her loose hair covers it, but the tell-tale sign of feeble steam wafting off her body is unmistakable. There’s nobody else it could be. 

The moment she looks properly at her, her chest lurches the slightest amount, and her blood freezes over with the chilling demersion of lightning comprehension— it becomes painfully clear what she’s here for. Even for someone like her, it’s difficult not to grimace or to resort to hyperbole as she sizes up Pieck’s current state with a glance: she looks like the embodiment of massacre. One of her arms is braced upon the door, shaking with the effort of holding herself up. The other is clutching at her torso, her blood-stained fingers a garish signpost exhorting Yelena to look at a scene of violence. Someone— or something— has ripped a deep, angry gash in her side, judging from the shock of scarlet blood now generously staining her frail, white blouse. It’s not regenerating properly, from the looks of it, a suspicion essentially confirmed by her presence here. She’s bent over, as if expending every last reserve of her energy on not crumpling onto the ground. 

And then her voice: “Yelena—“ a pause, as she wheezes with pain, “—I need help.”

What an impeccable sense of timing. Of course she knows she’s nearby, scarcely five meters away from her, even without her saying anything. She always had a sixth sense for these things. It makes it impossible to sneak up on her. It makes it heartwrenching, somehow, to see her calling out like this. Yelena’s eyes glaze over with exasperation.

And then Pieck collapses.

 _Fuck,_ Yelena thinks. She stiffens her lips for just a second before she steels herself and springs into action right away. Her boots make a rhythmic _tap-tap-tap_ as she flies across the width of the room. Amidst the commotion and clamour across the place, few others have noticed the stranger who just made a bleeding ingress into the room, but Yelena needs to get her out of sight quickly before someone notices and becomes suspicious. Her first instinct is to sweep her battalion jacket off her arms and then wrap it around Pieck to cloak the sight of steam and blood. It’s something she might get into trouble for later, if she ruins it, but that’s dead last on her list of teeth-gritting concerns right now.

The jacket dwarfs Pieck, and— not for the first time— it cuts across to Yelena how small, how vulnerable she really is. She feels an unwanted twinge in her chest. 

But there's no time to stall. “Can you walk?” Yelena asks tersely, head hovering above her ear. And then, seeing the sheer difficulty with which Pieck is attempting to stay in place alone, she unilaterally decides the answer is a _no_ , and takes matters into her own hands. “Stay with me, and keep your head down,” she next says as her sole warning, and scoops Pieck up into her arms in one efficient, brusque motion. Pieck lets out a sharp gasp at the pain and shudders in her arms, but she catches on and uses her remaining free, clean hand to grip faintly at Yelena’s back. 

The bunk room upstairs is where they need to go. It’s used half as a storage space, half as a place for housing fugitives these days, and it’s badly in want of a tidying up. But there are some beds there, and it will have to do. 

On her way to the staircases, she comes across Onyankopon coming out from a room with some paperwork, and times the momentum of her steps so she can brush past his shoulders to get his attention. She allows him exactly one second of astonishment before getting to business. 

“Wha—?” Onyankopon says, furrowing his brows upon seeing the small woman gripped in Yelena’s arms.

“Get me the first aid kit,” Yelena orders, staring straight at him, “and the stitching tools. And lots of gauze. Now.”

Onyankopon looks like he wants to ask a thousand things, like, _you’re not a doctor, are you sure about this_ , or _do you want help,_ or _this woman’s not one of us, where on earth did she come from?_ but true to a man of his calibre, to his credit, he keeps silent and gives a clipped nod of assent instead. His shoulders huff with some resignation, as his lips uncurl into a straight feint. “Alright, Yelena.” 

_Good and responsible_ , Yelena thinks. Satisfied, Yelena continues past again, throwing nary a glance behind her, and simply adds on as she departs: “I’ll be in the attic rooms. And don’t tell anyone about this.”

Onyankopon’s a man of his word, one of the rare people one can truly say that about. She has confidence he’ll also agree to that last request. But for now: the beds. She hurries upwards. 

There are two soldiers at the top, gossiping together and having what they think is a discreet smoke in the enclosed space within the hallway. She barks a _get out_ at them, and they scatter easily like frightened sparrows, trying in vain to stub out their contraband cigarettes and look apologetic in the face of Yelena’s withering stare.

She finds the right room and strides in, settling Pieck and her jacket none too gently down upon the nearest bed. The half-hearted apology in response to Pieck’s hiss of agony is muttered under her breath. Pieck’s blood— so much of it, still, everywhere, Yelena observes with vexation— immediately smears the bed a stark crimson. She can only pray that Pieck’s healing factor resolves it cleanly into a vapour of nothingness down the line. There’s soon knocking at the door, and Yelena goes to retrieve a veritable armful of medical supplies from Onyankopon. He calls a “good luck” behind him as he briskly walks away.

Yelena quickly locks the door behind her. That done, she turns back to the bed to face the patient she has been reluctantly saddled with. 

“Never thought this day would come,” Yelena mutters. “Tell me you’re not dying. That would create a lot of problems.”

Pieck’s eyes prise open from where they were wrenched shut earlier, to conserve energy better spent on bracing herself against the waves of soul-spearing pain afflicting her. She turns her face to gaze into her eyes, hardy and authoritative despite her circumstances. She looks wan, and her hair is clinging to the sides of her face with exertion, but she has a commanding presence still. The light shines almost fondly upon her face, the gentle sandstone tinge of her tan skin meeting the brightness warmly to give her an appealing cast. It glows in contrast to the dark blood and viscera splattered chaotically across parts of her face and arms. The difference is night and day. _Crimson truly isn’t her colour,_ Yelena thinks. _Not against her skin, not like this._

Pieck slowly lifts one hand to give a noncommittal wave, as if to say: _no, not yet._ Her voice comes out faint like the shadow of a whisper, but there is still a reedy strength underlying it, the embers of her usual vitality. “Do you remember what we talked about, about my titan and regeneration?” 

“Of course.” Yelena crosses her arms, and frowns.

“Then I trust you,” Pieck concludes, and turns her head away from Yelena to rest on the pillow and close her eyes. “You know what to do.”

“I’ll try,” Yelena deadpans. She crouches by the bed to assess Pieck’s condition. “Apologies in advance. I’m neither deft nor gentle.”

She looks, properly, for the first time to determine what it is she has to do. Pieck’s blouse is sticking uncomfortably to the contours of her wound, revealing the true extent and perimeter of it, and even through her clothes the candid implications make her shake her head. No wonder she needed help. Taking out a substantive number of major organs will tax the healing factor of any Warrior, superhuman soldier or not, and Pieck’s regeneration speed has never been the greatest among the others. It’s a feat that she managed to walk here at all. 

(It’s funny, the thought quickly crosses her mind, how much fragility underlies the shifters’ supposed invulnerability. At the end of the day they’re all too painfully human still, in more ways than meets the eye.)

Yelena sees clearly what has to be done. Stitches— if even possible— to hold skin and flesh together until the supernatural circuitry of shifter regeneration can get enough of a grip to fuse it all correctly. Bandages for less severe wounds, to relieve pain. They’re ordinarily wasted on a titan shifter, is Yelena’s frank opinion, but she can respect that Pieck wouldn’t want to be writhing in pain while recovering. And then cleaning up the blood. 

She recalls Pieck’s words vividly in her head now, from the time they had that conversation at length about exactly this, about the various affordances as well as defects of her healing factor. It was something Pieck had told her only after much deliberation. She had spoken in solemn tones as if she were a kingpin soldier revealing a hamartia, or betraying a state secret to someone it was not meant for. _Regeneration isn’t foolproof,_ she had said, a little philosophically. _Sometimes destruction outwins it. Sometimes, if the pain is overwhelming, nothing heals as it should._ And then she had gone on to explain the things precisely leading up to this moment: the need for extra stitches or grafts in extreme situations, the threshold where her factor’s breaking point lay (usually anything threatening to blow multiple parts of herself up, or— she laughed darkly here— her losing the will to live), the various experimental runs she’d been subjected to to puzzle all this together, excruciating piece by excruciating piece, and so on.

Yelena was trained as a soldier, not a medic. But there is a baseline level of medical knowledge everyone in the Marleyan military is expected to know, and she’s grasped bits of the healing arts over her years in service to work on herself. It’s better, always, to be self-sufficient in the face of contingencies. All that means stitches are only slightly out of her remit of knowledge. But that matters little; she’s dealing with a titan shifter here, who can withstand bodily slight far beyond the greatest comprehension of mere mortals. And besides, there’s no time to sweat the small things.

Time to dive in, then. Her goal is to work methodically but seamlessly. Better to do a job right, and more importantly, do it once. The first thing to do is to uncover the actual wound site. She helps Pieck lean up so she can shuck off Yelena’s jacket, now looking sorry for itself with blood and dirt caked onto it. 

Then she works at the buttons of Pieck’s blouse with both hands, starting at the height of her clavicle. Slowly, the fabric peels away to reveal more and more of her blood-mottled body: the suggestion of her sternum, the vulnerable indentations of her ribs, the lightning-shaped braid of her veins, and— here the sight sets Yelena’s teeth on edge— the festering crater in the side of her body. At last she remains only in the bindings wrapped around her chest, all upper wear discarded on the floor. The blinding smell of coppery iron fills the room. She gingerly presses a hand to where Pieck’s lungs must be, as if in an analytical touch, or, or— a move to steady herself and keep her composure. 

The last time she was doing something like this with Pieck, it was in a completely different context: her mouth had been damp against the smooth vale of her chest, and her gestures had been meant to rend wholly different sensations out of her. She has seen Pieck open and near-naked like this more than a few times, and yet there is a harsh newness to the cast of her body here and now. Seeing her incapacitated and defenceless like this is less a thrilling novelty and more the least appealing taste in her mouth imaginable. She would usually welcome the opportunity to be the executor of someone’s life and death, for the power it plants into her grip. But this is different; she derives no joy from this. With only the two of them in the thick silence of this room to bear witness to this ritual, this is more like a disarming intimacy— intimacy neither of them want to have witnessed, because the cost of it was too heavy. 

The newly bared expanse of Pieck’s torso now says: this body is fraying at the edges. Yelena looks at the wound and tries to focus on something other than the horizontal extent of it, the radical asymmetry it has torn into her waist. She can see the steam coming off the edges of the cut where someone took out a chunk of her abdominal organs: cells trying in vain to materialise and recreate themselves anew. Ordinarily, the healing factor knits back skin and bones seamlessly enough in real-time that it resembles the swift blanketing of ancient light from a sunrise over snow— it looks natural and smooth, nothing short of a marvel. But here Pieck has lost enough of blood and herself to exsanguinate all that. 

Yelena doesn’t vacillate. She wets some rags with water from a sink in the adjoining ensuite, then cleans away the blood and detritus on Pieck’s face, Pieck’s extremities, the boundary of flesh encircling the deep gash, working with efficiency. Pieck lets out choked sounds and hisses as Yelena touches the various junctures of her hurting body, voice arrested in her throat like splintered glass. When Yelena presses down too hard near her disfigured torso, she yelps and shudders with a slick, anatomical roll of her shoulders, staring with a pained look at the ceiling all the while. 

Yelena finds herself unable to whisper any apologies, her throat inhibited by tension, so she tries to get across her restrained _sorry, sorry, sorry’s_ by moderating the press of her fingertips as much as she possibly can. Gentleness has never been her strong suit; she has not yet intuited that sweet spot between the sickly weakness of kindness and the detachment of apathy where she can reside. She is so unlike Pieck, whose open hands bleed tough love, but speak still of an unshakeable core of utter humanness amenable to softening. She has never been a person of balance, after all this time. If she wants to be the vassal of revolution someday, as she does, that role calls for her to cavort upon the precipice of action, to be the one responsible for firing the flare. It is both her greatest virtue and downfall. Perhaps it is why she keeps Pieck around, to be a stabilising presence to mellow her out when she is unable to do it herself.

But she tries to focus on the task at hand. With a cleaner surface to work on, now, she readies the stitching tools. Taking a closer glance at the insides of the gash, she sees a chaotic blend of colours rushing up to meet her eye. The meagre, whitefish stretch of what little tissue Pieck was able to regenerate, topped with the faint striations of muscle. An agglutinative mass of raw flesh and adipose pulp. And the writhing, vehement claret of her marred organs. Yelena has her work cut out for her. All these things are part of Pieck, yet so unlike her: it is a picture of the woman before her broken down into her component parts, and it is both haunting and breathtaking somehow, in the many conflicted senses of those words sitting side by side together.

Here she has to pause to steel her nerves. She has seen her fair share of mangled bodies in her time in the Marleyan military, but it’s still more than a little difficult to look at the extent of what a titan shifter like Pieck must bear. It’s something she has thought about in her own time: what must it feel like, to have to suffer through the perpetual trauma of injury? But it is a different affair to be confronted in the flesh by the embodied burden carried by Pieck’s kind, a burden that is so simultaneously gift and curse. To see for herself how her capacity for pain must have had to be continually extended and gouged deeper to accommodate all the violence repeatedly done to her body. It’s a thought that chills even Yelena to the bone.

She can only begin to guess at how it feels and she can gain only an imperfect picture from the descriptions slipped to her from Pieck across a coffee rendezvous, or bitter remarks gritted out between teeth, fished out only ever from the most shallow depths of that well of pain Pieck is subjected to, and never able to capture the true experience. She can venture to suggest that it turns your body into a prison, caging you in the act of always striving but never terminating, never allowing you to be put to rest; and she can tell from the fragments Pieck has said on the matter, and the simple fact of the woman lying before her now, that it is a piecemeal agony of the loneliest kind, because people will leave you to your devices with nothing to help the all-consuming blaze of pain along the way, assuming that your regeneration is enough.

But these words would be futile devices, and laughably pointless against the prickling exigency of one’s body— and the world— betraying them. 

There are rarely scars left upon Pieck’s body to serve as the artefacts of her injuries. Her mysterious healing often takes care of them. But Yelena knows that if she ever peered inside it, her mind would keep the score. Even though she’s still nonplussed about Pieck barging in without advance notice, her mild annoyance has given way to a circumspect respect for what Pieck is suffering through. It must be tiring to have to go through the motions, over and over again, of destruction and regeneration. _She_ feels tired just thinking about it. It must seem pointless after a fashion. At the end of the day, she can’t help but soften a little and feel sorry for Pieck’s plight. 

And knowing all this, she hastens to fix things for her.

“Where does it hurt?” she asks matter-of-factly, meaning, _where should I start first?_ but also, _how are you feeling?_

“Everywhere,” Pieck bites out without missing a beat, and Yelena knows her well enough to tell that she doesn’t just mean physically. 

In the wake of the ensuing silence she decides to go where her knife-writ intuition guides her. Since it’s anybody’s guess what she should begin with, she goes for the most practical place to start with: the top layers of Pieck’s skin. There’s unfortunately little she can do for her organs save for a transplant. With gloves on, more to protect herself from the blistering heat of Pieck’s steam than anything, she aims with purpose like a bullet shot straight into the ground, travelling a direct path. The sutures go onto the parts of the skin she can see, and she chains as many layers of visible flesh and nerve together as she can. It’ll all act as scaffolding to help her body cope. She had warned Pieck earlier that she was far from deft, but she finds now that she is somehow able to work with the focus and competence the situation demands. She is grateful for it. 

It’s not a pleasant experience for Pieck. At one point Pieck single-handedly tears up a strip of cloth from the bedsheet to fold and bite on, to muffle her cries of pain as Yelena rummages around in the wreckage of her body. She tenses her hands around Yelena’s shoulders as if to anchor herself to something and then thinks better of it, fisting them in the fabric of the bed. It still hurts even for someone like Pieck, who dances on the not-too-different edges of being unhuman and superhuman both. It hurts like a necessary evil. But she suffers through it with admirable dignity all the while, letting Yelena draw close enough to her body to both spark heat and rend her into pieces if she wanted. 

Yelena hurries up her pace slightly afterwards. Thankfully, when she’s halfway through her amateurish medical intervention, Pieck’s healing factor starts catching on. The steam comes in more rapid puffs. A semblance of normalcy returns to her regeneration, and her skin grows over by itself. Eventually it’s clear that her healing factor will be able to take care of things, and Yelena moves swiftly on to cleaning up. The pain abates for Pieck afterwards, too, judging from the way her breath slows down and the way her fists unclench themselves from the sheets. A visible sigh of relief undulates gently through Pieck, and it is as if her agony has decompressed itself from her body. Finally, the gash closes in on itself. 

Yelena winds a few pieces of gauze and bandages around small grazes and cuts on her limbs, and then wipes away the last specks of blood dotting her midsection. When she’s done, there’s a fine sheen of exertion on her brows. She looks down at Pieck, whose eyes are now closed in peaceful rest. The colour is slowly returning to her cheeks, a fact that brings relief to the thudding echo of her heart. Her original blouse is now ruined and worth little more than an afterthought. But Yelena remedies the situation by retrieving a spare, clean set of clothes from one of the dumping-ground-slash-cabinets in the room. The size will likely be a little off on Pieck’s small frame, but that matters little. As a finishing touch, she also leaves a cup of water on the table beside the bed for her. It’s what she would want too if she were in the same situation.

She had been in a rush earlier to deal with things quickly. But now that she’s done, she finds contradictorily that she doesn’t actually want to leave, doesn’t mind lingering here for a few more moments with Pieck. They have rarely gotten any time together for the past few months. She can allow both of them the indulgence just this once, she thinks. 

Her reverie is broken by the sound of Pieck speaking up. “Thank you for that.” When she looks over, Pieck’s gazing at her with a worn out but grateful look. “... I was right to come here.”

Yelena ignores the quaver of a complicated emotion that courses through her. She suddenly feels very tired, and tosses the clean shirt into Pieck’s hands to lose herself the burden. Then, after Pieck has slipped it around her shoulders, she wearily pulls over a chair and sits on it, resting one heel nonchalantly on top of her knee. “So. What happened?” 

Pieck grimaces, as if parsing how best to answer what is in fact a loaded question. “I lost my squad. And they,” she makes a vague sign with her hands to show she means _the enemy,_ “caught me off-guard with some new type of artillery… specifically anti-titan, probably, given the number it did on me.”

Yelena’s eyes widen imperceptibly, but she gives a curt nod. It’s not something either of them will likely go into now, but it’s both unsurprising and bad news at the same time: the rest of the world slowly refining its arsenal for taking out titans. She thanks whatever higher being is out there that Pieck usually has the speed and quick wits to extricate herself from situations before they get too ugly. Or she dies, in this case. “Why find me here?”

Pieck sighs. “Lost contact with anyone who could help me. I actually passed out for a few hours in a forest before I came here, and I realised when I woke up that something was terribly wrong with me.” She's raising herself into an upright position now, cradling the cup of water in her hands and staring straight at Yelena. “Stroke of luck that I was there and had a map, really, because I soon figured out that I was close enough to this place to begin the most hellish one-hour crawl of my life.”

A wave of cool wrath washes over Yelena. “Nobody realised something was wrong?”

She gets a shrug in response. “Like I said, I lost contact. And I was stranded.” 

“You nearly died.”

Pieck huffs in resignation. “Give me some credit. I wouldn’t have gotten myself that close. If I was a corpse, I was a downright functional one. I was still able to survive out in the open for hours, for god’s sake.”

Yelena narrows her eyes. Her voice is even as usual, but her words bear the mark of her animosity. “There’s still blood on the hands of the commanders who failed to pull you out of there.”

Pieck says nothing in response to that; she’s silent for an eerie while, in fact, hanging her head sombrely. When she speaks up, she looks away. “I’m not sure if they’re alive, Yelena. They were near the crossfire too.”

A shock, and then a pang as the taut silence widens between them. There’s nothing meaningful anyone can say to that— and so Yelena simply stays her hand, tilting her head up to gaze out the window at the blue sky beyond the confines of their room. 

She muses instead, a little tiredly but also whimsically, about how very human this entire event has been, in the political sense. Every orchestration and trigger and cause, and finally the resolution too in the form of her intervention, had been wrought forth by human hands. There’s an irony to that fact, crystallising now within her mind as she teases out the threads of causation surrounding the moment Pieck had invited herself to her base. For all that the power of the titans is something apparently god-given, no gods have come to save anyone here, in the end. A few years ago, she would have thought the existence of titan shifters a miracle, a crucible where longevity and mortal flesh were transubstantiated into unimaginable, otherworldly power. Time has denuded that perspective into something more circumspect. Ymir had granted Eldians that power, but she had also abandoned them now. Perhaps she had been no god, if she had indifferently left her citizens to fend for themselves like this. If what she had left had powered a bitter, centuries-long crusade that continues against the Eldians today.

She has no answers for that problem right now, aside from her conviction that Marley isn’t in the right. But she does know that maybe no gods ever existed, in contrast to what the history books assert, thank you very much; or rather, if they did, Yelena would very much prefer they be the kind to intervene, to take responsibility for what they have birthed, instead of spectating over the suffering of those on this earth, like the worst kind of callous observer. 

So far, nobody’s been worthy enough to rise to that mantle. In the meantime, since nobody’s coming to help them, it’s up to the people on the ground to seize history and bend it to their will. All else is window dressing. It’s why she bides her time these days with coalitions and unions, bearing the call of insurrection in her hands. 

But all that is old news. 

She sees Pieck tapping her fingers in an agitated rhythm against the porcelain of the cup, and Yelena knows she is trying to distract herself from dealing with the gulf of losses she has just endured. 

There’s not much use having a conversation about that now; it’s all a foregone conclusion. They’ve had that chat too many times before, and it always circles back around to the same ineffectual platitudes: _it’s not your fault, they’re in a better place,_ and _trust me, I’m a lowly grunt like they were too, our lives are worth little in the long run,_ et cetera, et cetera. 

She tries a different approach. 

“I _was_ busy at work with something before this, you know,” she snipes at Pieck, but it comes out more as a light-hearted jab, with no real malice behind it. Or so she hopes. 

“Were you?” Pieck snaps out of her numbed trance and turns her head back, the pinprick of a taunting smile on her face. Thankfully, she seems to have taken Yelena’s conversational gambit as a welcome distraction. “Anything important?” 

Yelena thinks about it: reams of paperwork, dossiers on recent developments in the war to write, cryptograms to encode and decipher. “Nothing that can’t be rearranged.” 

“How lucky for you,” Pieck murmurs, not unfondly, “and how unfortunate for me. I’ll have to be stuck here with you a little longer.”

Yelena snorts, feeling more at ease as she settles back into her usual rhythm with Pieck. “Speak for yourself. Would that be so bad?”

Pieck smiles to herself, examining her hands as she shakes her head gently. “Maybe not.”

The quiet that envelopes them afterwards is meaningful but tolerable. Yelena closes her eyes, intending to catch a breather from the heightened rush of pulling Pieck away from the brink of death earlier. She’s caught off guard when she feels a warm thumb brush against her chin.

She opens her eyes, and finds Pieck gazing right at her, pressing against an unseen spot on her cheek. “You’ve gotten some blood on yourself,” she whispers, eyes intent, and then wipes at it, presumably taking care of it. But still she doesn't move her hand away. She keeps it there, thumb grazing her lips in a tattoo of disarming heat.

Perhaps she’s getting sentimental, because somehow her next automatic reflex is to grasp Pieck’s face in both hands and lean in to kiss her feverishly, anchoring her fingers in the silky density of her long hair. There’s suddenly an eruption of all the coiled up tension from the near-death experience earlier she hadn’t realised was there, and she holds onto Pieck like a vice grip, pouring all of it into the kiss. At least Pieck has the decency to act like she did see this coming: she closes her eyes and cradles her hand at the back of Yelena’s neck, deepening the kiss, curling her body up against hers. The voice in the back of Yelena’s head was right. It has been too long for them. 

“So,” she says when they part breathlessly, voice coming out a little ragged. 

“So,” Pieck agrees, her face still close enough to hers to radiate heat onto her cheek. 

“Wouldn’t it be better if I left you alone to rest, because I can certainly do—”

“No,” Pieck cuts in right away. “No, please don’t.” She drops her head and buries it in the crook of Yelena’s neck, bracing her arms upon her shoulders. “It would be better if you were here.”

She catches the subtext underlying her words: _I can’t be alone right now, or my head will catch up and torment me._

And, indeed, she can appreciate that nobody ever wants to be alone after witnessing something as horrific as a massacre. Especially if they were the only survivor. 

She lifts one hand a little melancholically, a little stiffly to rub at Pieck’s back, trying to offer what small show of comfort she can. Amidst the tangle of thoughts she’s been having about gods, the boundaries of human striving, the glossary of Pieck’s burdens, staying here is the one task that would be easy for her to do right now. She can do that much for Pieck: first the service of bearing witness to her pain, and then solace for her in the aftermath.

They remain embracing like that for a while, like the two sole sensible things in a world absurd and crooked. Then Pieck shifts so she is leaning her head upon Yelena’s shoulder. There, in the amniotic quiet, she holds her hands up to submerge them in the warm light from the windows, as if she is a reborn specimen welcoming existence.

**Author's Note:**

>  **expanded content warnings:** this piece contains semi-graphic descriptions of blood and injuries; they’re described more in literary/metaphorical terms than in realistic detail, but if you’re easily squeamish you can skip the middle, which is where the bulk of those descriptions are. 
> 
> apologies to any medical professionals reading this. I took great artistic license with the medical realism in this; this isn’t meant to be true to life. needless to say, please don’t perform homebrewed stitching surgery on yourself!
> 
> as always, i can be found on [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/meikuree)/[tumblr](https://meikuree.tumblr.com/)


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